Roadwork is completed at Edens Spur, Tri-State

3-year project improves access

August 31, 2001|By Rogers Worthington, Tribune staff reporter.

After more than three years of construction, lane closings and inconvenience for motorists, Friday will be liberation day near the former Deerfield toll plaza at the junction of the Edens Spur and the Tri-State Tollway.

A new underpass connecting Edens Spur (Interstate Highway 94) traffic to Deerfield Road is scheduled to open Friday morning.

Later in the day, northbound Tri-State (Interstate Highway 294) traffic will be restored to three lanes from two.

"Customers' access to the roadway will change dramatically Friday," said Joelle McGinnis, spokeswoman for the Illinois State Toll Highway Authority.

The final piece of the $116.7 million project, which began with the razing of the huge and congested Deerfield Road toll plaza, is a new ramp to ferry traffic from Lake-Cook Road to the northbound lanes of the Tri-State.

It is scheduled to open in mid-September, she said.

Such big-ticket projects are less common in the current tollway budget and the proposed budget for 2002, which toll authority board members saw at their monthly meeting Thursday in Downers Grove.

Board members were looking at a $306.4 million budget, with $119.7 million for infrastructure preservation.

"This is the minimum we must to do to maintain a safe and well-functioning roadway for our customers," McGinnis said.

That will include pavement rehabilitation on the Northwest Tollway (Interstate Highway 90) from Rosemont to west of Roselle Road in Hoffman Estates; bridge rehabilitation on the south Tri-State Tollway, and intermittent pavement repairs on the north Tri-State, the Northwest Tollway from just west of the Fox River to Rockford and most of the East-West Tollway (Interstate Highway 88).

About $1.3 million is allocated for additional I-PASS Only lanes at the Waukegan and Touhy plazas on the Tri-State Tollway and the Devon plaza on the Northwest Tollway.

Also in the budget is $456,000 for in-car video recorders for the Illinois State Police cars of District 15, which are assigned to the tollway. Cameras for the rest of the state police's fleet are paid for by the Illinois Department of Transportation.

Tollway officials say they are operating under fiscal restraints without a toll increase to fully rebuild the system. Thomas Cuculich, executive director of the toll authority, has said the tollway's finances will be in the red by the last quarter of 2004 without a toll increase.

"The fact [that] we don't have money to do the improvements necessary, that's really affecting our planning," he said. "We need to be doing construction projects much like the Stevenson [Expressway] . . . Instead, we will continue to patch an old system. . . . You are seeing orange cones go up in the same section of roadway more frequently."

Cuculich said he expects environmental approval for the extension of Interstate Highway 355 into Will County to come by the end of the year. But funding to build the extension has not been identified, and there may be new competing projects to fund as well, he said.

"If the tollway is part of the final plan for the airport solution, the ground component--the western bypass--that's an $800 million project. To do that we mush rewiden I-90 first. That's a half-billion dollar project. If we're part of the ground transportation plan, it taxes our budget a great deal."

Board members also voted to renew negotiations over a $95 million plan to rebuild five of the system's gasoline and food oases with Wilton Partners, the Los Angeles real estate development firm that last year was awarded the contract.

Negotiations were broken off July 26 for reasons tollway officials would not explain.